Posts tagged “books”

The House has gone through a number of extensions, renovations and repairs. From a humble 25 square meters house on 69 square meters lot to about 700 (including a proposed 5-doors apartments at the back), can you imagine how many has been done through all these years?

With the generous help and support of Arch. Butch who provide an almost free assistance, we finally came up with plan to do what I can say “the realization of our dream”. We were so scared as we know our budget seems not enough to start the project.

It was sometime October 2016, when we had the discussion and came up with the plan to have the renovation. We just wanted to re-roof and improve the facade that would make all previous extensions looks like it was done at one time.

The sketches were drawn and shown to us by the architect.

November 2016 from these initial concepts, it started to snowballed into Olympic scale. These drawing started to take its form as Juni, my well-trusted contractor, started to demolish, break, and rebuilt. Deliveries of materials started to filed up our space and the first hollow block has been set.

What makes us finally decide to have this major decision of rebuilding our house? It’s the leak. This bungalow was actually designed and proposed for another storey in the future. So, obviously all the extension has been covered with a slab roof that would serve later as the flooring for the next phase. Unfortunately, budget did not allow me to push with the rest of my plan yet and it’s a fact that a slab is not a wise idea as a shelter from rain. The leaked damage our ceiling and other stuffs below it. We have to bear that for several years, whilst spending money for repairing and repainting till the next rainy season, again and again.

Hence, we came up with the solution, to cover the roof of the whole house and forgo the idea of the having another floor.

From paper…

To the real thing (with long time business partners, Edgar for the trusses and Apollo for roofing installation). The roof was a combination of Banawe and Multirib from Puyat Steel (0.50mm).

Library And Wardrobe. In a 1,100-square-foot loft in Emeryville, California, Lynda and Peter Benoit designed and built a wooden structure to hold books and keepsakes, store clothes, and house a bedroom. Peter documented the whole design-build process in this three-part series. Photo by Drew Kelly.

Modern Small Space Bedroom Nook With Stairs. Not a square inch of storage is lost in Michael Pozner’s not-quite-500-square-foot aerie in Greenwich Village. Of the seven steps leading up to the sleeping area, five contain drawers. His small set of table and chairs is from CB2.

A pair of windows shed a bit of light in the Harpoon House bedroom, which boasts a lofted bed and workspace with a sink and closet beneath. The sink is by Lacava and the tap is from Fluid Faucet’s Wisdom line. “People ask us, ‘What did you do to make your house not feel like this cramped little thing?’ with the idea that the house is trying to act big,” says resident Katherine Bovee. “It’s not. It’s a small house acting like a small house. We built the house to fit in its own skin.” Photo by John Clark

“This unit is oddly shaped, with every wall at an angle, and I wanted to do something more interesting than just putting up a wall in the middle,” says architect Nathan Lee Colkitt. To that end, he devised two lofts in his apartment: one for sleeping and one for reading.

Located in New York City’s Union Square area, this 700-square-foot apartment features a bedroom lofted above a full kitchen. The volume that both incorporates the single closet (accessible from the hallway) and the refrigerator (which opens into the kitchen) and serves as the bedroom floor is, says resident Kyu Sung Woo, “where everything comes together.” Photo by Adam Friedberg

Crunched for space, the residents of these homes—mostly under 1,000 square feet—have the same ideas: look upward and compartmentalize. Lofted sleeping areas, closets, and reading nooks are among the smart space-saving solutions.

I have always wanted to put my favorite books on display, hoping someone else would see and enjoy them, but I have struggled with finding a solution that doesn’t look too deliberate… until now. The Piastra is a wall mounted book shelf that brings home the functional simplicity of the magazine rack to create an all-around dynamic interior object that allows quick and intuitive access to reading.

The inscription over the door at the Library at Thebes says: Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul. Perhaps “for the soul” would be more appropriate, but I’m not going to nitpick because I love the sentiment. Sometimes with all of the technology we have, I fear we forget about the greatest resource we have for taking us far far away, teaching us, engaging children to learn, sparking our imaginations and giving good company: books.